


that summer feeling

by kibbleboy



Category: IT (2017), IT - Stephen King
Genre: F/M, also the urises are underrated, but it will still make sense if you haven't, in case that wasn't clear, kind of meshed it 2017 canon with book canon, this is about the flute lady chomping the righteous fuck out of stan's face in the sewer by the way, this will probably be more rewarding for people who have read the book
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-19
Updated: 2018-08-19
Packaged: 2019-06-28 20:34:56
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,208
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15714615
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kibbleboy/pseuds/kibbleboy
Summary: is gonna haunt you one day in your lifeStan Uris has the scars on his face, but not the memories that go with them.





	that summer feeling

Stan, who had been looking up at the baby blue sky as a flock of Canadian geese flew their formation through, had not answered the question at first. But Patty had given him time to, watching him carefully, and it had been the first time in their marriage that a silence could reasonably be called awkward.

Stanley and Patricia Uris were sitting on a park bench by the side of a man-made pond, hand in hand. A book lay idly open on Stan's left thigh: _Peterson Field Guide to the Birds of Eastern and Central North America_ by Roger Tory Peterson. There was a small notepad and a pencil in his breast pocket, too, but that he had brought more out of habit than any intention to use it. This was not something he and his wife (married only two or so years ago) did often. In fact, these days, it wasn't even something _he_ did often. But last week, Patty had mentioned over dinner seeing a large bird by the pond at the park near their house, with a red crest on its white head and an elongated brown body. The possibility that it could be a Mississippi Sandhill Crane-- the first wild one seen out of Jackson County, Mississippi in years-- had rejuvenated his boyhood adoration for birds and excited him far too much not to go looking. Patty had always been an impressionable woman, and his excitement had washed over her like a tidal wave. So it came to be that in the middle of a Sunday morning, Stan and Patty were sat on a park bench with an old pair of binoculars between them, both engaged in a mild lesson of bird-watching.

Patty ended the pregnant silence (or perhaps fertilized it further) by repeating her question. 

"Stan? I asked how you got those little scars on your cheeks," she said tentatively. Stan could tell that she didn't quite want to ask-- didn't want to cause him any pain, of course-- but her curiosity had won over. Stan touched a hand to the side of his face. They _were_ strange scars, he figured. 

"Right," Stan responded easily. He had heard her the first time. And really, he wouldn't mind telling her the full story, honest. The trouble of it all, though, was that as soon as she had mentioned his scars, he had realized he hadn't thought about them in quite a long time. In truth, he wasn't sure he remembered how he got them. "Could you give me a moment to remember? It happened when I was little."

He didn't look at Patty's face, but she sounded surprised, maybe a little dumbfounded. "Oh, sure. You just tell me when you're ready, okay honey?" she said, squeezing his hand. 

After what seemed like a long and difficult time of unforgetting, Stan glanced at his watch. It had taken him about seven minutes to come up with anything solid. Why his memories had come crawling back to him slower than a  
( _turtle_ )  
snail, he wasn't sure, but he now turned a little on the bench to face his wife. She was looking expectantly at him, pretty brown eyes wide with interest.

"It happened when I was about thirteen," he began, narrowing his eyes a little in the effort of keeping the slippery memory firm in his mind. "I'd gone down to the sewers with some friends that summer, underneath my hometown."

"The sewers!" Patty cried, making a face. "That doesn't sound like you at all. You really ran around in sewage water with other boys for _fun_?"

"Greywater," Stan said immediately. Then, a little surprised at himself, he chuckled. "It was gross, though. I think we had some reason to be down there, but I don't really remember. But we weren't just playing down there. I think...there was some other boy, too, chasing us. He must've left after a while. Maybe he'd chased us down there in the first place. And there was a girl."

"Anyone I know?" Patty asked, teasing.

"You'd think I'd remember the kids I used to hang around, but I guess I don't," Stan admitted, almost sheepishly.

"Jeez, they must have been pretty forgettable friends," she laughed.

Stan suddenly wanted desperately to cry out, to prove her wrong-- but the strange urge was quelled almost as soon as it came to be. How could he, really? She was right, his fully-formed adult brain didn't have a clue who those kids had been. He had left that memory somewhere irretrievable, he felt, but there was some sort of urgency bound to that thought...like maybe he wasn't the one who had let go of his childhood memories. Maybe something else had let go of them for him. But he couldn't tell Patty all this, of course. Just like he couldn't tell her that he felt like something wretched had followed him out of his hometown when he moved away, and that sometimes, he felt certain it  
( _It_ )  
would someday catch up to him. 

None of it was proof. Just paranoid feelings left over from an unmemorable childhood fear. Like the bogeyman, or clowns. 

"Yeah," Stan finally settled on saying. His voice was steady, but Patty rubbed little circles into his hand with her thumb as if she understood.

"Anyway, we were all down there in a group. I remember the sewage smell, that much is for sure. It was like death. I'm sure my sneakers stank for the rest of the summer, that's how bad it was. And I remember thinking about my dad when we went down there." 

"Your dad?" Patty repeated. "Were you worried you'd get in trouble?"

Stan spoke truthfully, but the words felt strange leaving his mouth. "No. Well, not for going down to the sewers. I was still in hot water for mouthing off at my Bar Mitzvah, I think."

Patty gave him an odd yet amused look. "Huh. Sometimes I think I would've liked to grow up in the same town as you. Anytime I hear something little about your childhood, it's a riot."

A cold shiver went through Stan's body. His hands had started to go clammy, and for some unidentifiable reason, the idea of Patty being around for his childhood, his childhood that he rarely thought about and could hardly remember-- made his gut clench up uncomfortably. 

"Well, I know for sure we got stopped somewhere," Stan went on, trying to stave off the sort of turbulent feeling that had arisen. "Not a clue why. And I don't know how-- you know, we were pretty young, and we were someplace we shouldn't have been. We probably just got spooked or something-- but we got separated. Me, from the group."

Patty was now listening intently with a curious wonder, like a child in the library during one of those summertime storybook days, when the librarian set out a whole hour and a half or so just to read aloud to tykes and toddlers all sitting on the floor in a circle. Stan didn't feel like himself at all.

"I remember being scared then. And I couldn't find my way back to them; I didn't know where I was. Almost like I lost time, or something, which I know sounds crazy. Suddenly, this-- this h-h-huge--"

All at once he stopped, utterly unable to continue. Somewhere along his recounting of the story he had begun sweating like a madman, enough to lightly soak through the armpits of his light blue button-down shirt. His breath was coming in short, quick gasps, like he was having  
( _an asthma attack_ )  
phantom heart palpitations. His hands were doing microscopic figure eights with a tremor that, compared to the steady feminine hand he was holding, made him look like an anemic. None of these facts had come to his full realization, however. When his mouth let out a stutter, he involuntarily swallowed the rest of his sentence and looked around. He didn't know what for.

"Stanley, honey, you don't have to talk about it anymore if you're in a bad way," Patty said gently, drawing him back to where he was. To _when_ he was. He looked back at her and found himself surprised to see that her eyes were brown, not blue. Of course they were brown. They were never blue in the first place. Stan blinked. Who had he expected to see sitting next to him?

"You're starting to make me worried, is all," Patty spoke up again. Her eyebrows tilted and then came down, as if to say they agreed with her. 

"I'm alright," Stan said, clearing his throat and trying to give her a reassuring smile. The next words came out as easily as if he had read them stamped on her forehead. Yes, he remembered now. It all seemed so silly. "After all, it was just a dog. That's the story. Some wild dog down there got my face a little too good."

Patricia Uris wasn't often one to hide the colorful expressions her face came up with, and she didn't now. She looked like she could hardly believe what he'd said. Her eyes flitted from one side of his face to the other, and then back again. He could feel the teeth mark scars on the sides of his jawline and temple start to pulse. 

"That must have really been a very big dog, to get your whole head like that," she said after a long pause, but she wasn't incredulous. The only emotion in her voice was concern now. 

_Loving concern,_ Stan thought, and the strange fear of telling an old story he only half remembered was gone.

"Or I was a small kid," he said, grinning. Patty smiled back, but her eyebrows didn't un-tilt themselves.

 His breath now steady, Stan was a little embarrassed. He wasn't sure what had come over him. Just the memory of fear, most likely. Fear could do a lot to a person. It could make someone do the strangest things, he figured. 

_Like in all those scary movies, when normal people with normal lives try to fight back against the serial killer,_ he thought out of nowhere. 

He pressed a quick kiss to the back of Patty's left hand, which he was still holding, before deftly closing the bird-watching guide that had sat this whole time on his leg.

"I'm sorry I made you tell that story," Patty murmured, sounding genuinely apologetic. He smiled again. She could be a little impulsive for her own good now and then, but Stan didn't think he'd ever seen a moment where she hadn't been kind. 

"Don't sweat it, Patty," he said reassuringly. "It's probably stranger that I never told you the story in the first place. Anyway, I don't think we're going to see any Mississippi Sandhill Cranes. I've only seen about a thousand Mallard ducks."

Patty's eyes got just a little brighter then. "Let's go home and see if Family Feud is playing," she said, grabbing onto his left arm with her free hand. 

"Alright," Stan said, laughing. He was glad to be done talking about his childhood. They both stood and began their walk out of the park and back home, just about a block and a half away. The conversation remained light and entertaining the whole way home, and Stanley really had lost the terrible sort of aching feelings he'd had before sitting on the park bench. Even so, he couldn't ignore the fact that the scars on the sides of his face hadn't stopped pulsing. 

Later that night, Patty would think about how contorted his face had seemed when he'd told her about the Maine sewers, how un-Stanley-like his eyes and the wobbly line of his mouth had been. Her mind would linger on this frighteningly even as she lay tucked into their soft queen size bed with his heavy sleep-breathing in her left ear, and she would wonder if maybe Stan's scars were given to him by a dog that was not quite a dog at all. It wasn't that she would think he had deliberately lied to her. She would simply wonder if something horrible enough had happened to her level-headed husband that his child brain had substituted a big, snarling dog for something worse. It would be irrational, a thought based purely on fear. The childish kind of fear that makes you look twice at objects in the dark. But thinking back on the way he had acted telling the story, on how distant his eyes had become, how cloudy...it wouldn't seem irrational at all. For the next hour and a half, she would imagine the primal fear of experiencing something biting into your face. The rancid saliva dripping, coating you in filth; sharp, ragged teeth sinking down into cheeks still soft with babyfat, hot and stinky breath clogging your airways, stealing your oxygen and your ability to scream out for help. Your own blood dripping down and pooling in your ears even after the beast miraculously opened its jaws and released you.

She would only fall into a fitful sleep at 4:27 AM, when the sun peeked weakly through their bedroom curtains and Stan began to snore. Lightly, like a dog growling.


End file.
